Leveraging Technology to Cater to Multi-Location Work Space

By Vipul Anand, Group Chief Information Officer, JSPL

Information Technology by nature is a powerful enabler, enhancing operational efficiencies of plants and processes across sectors. Especially in the core infrastructure sectors, which are capital intensive, with long gestation periods and even longer operational life-cycles, IT systems are critical from the project planning stages.

Effective utilization of Information technologies is a necessity to cater to a large multi-location work space. For this, each location must be equipped with state-of-the-art IT facilities such as newest tools in IT Infrastructure, IT Communication and IT Applications. Along with these facilities, a strong in-house team of technical experts is mandatory that has rich experience and innovation in creating and adopting latest technologies.

"Staying connected with internal & external stakeholder is of paramount importance and businesses must think and act differently to succeed in the digital ecosystem"

In today's context, staying connected with internal & external stakeholders is of paramount importance. Businesses must think and act differently to succeed in this new digital ecosystem. Adopting a new technology is much simpler than its effective utilization. We all need to keep learning, un-learning and re-learning technology applications, so as to keep our technology expertise in-vogue.

Countering Business Challenges with IT

The Information Technology systems at JSPL revolve around the Group IT philosophy of identifying future-proof technologies and their efficacious implementation by training in-house manpower to harness the domain expertise, critical for success of day-to-day operations. Our IT strategy has been to ensure a robust and agile IT platform for all business needs. IT systems of a core infrastructure organization is the fabric woven from multiple technology threads to efficaciously connect plants, processes and people to arrive at the best suited product-mix for sustaining the desired profitability forecasts.

Our collaborations and strategic partnerships with world's leading hardware, software and service innovators ensure that we are always abreast of the under-development technologies, which helps us to plan in advance to implement process-enhancers and game-changers.In order to keep IT teams motivated and updated with latest trends and solutions, training sessions for augmenting their skills is of principal significance.

JSPL uses business processes which are automated with best of application tools for planning, purchase, and production, which helps to bring strong and robust process based working across business locations and with improved efficiencies of operations.

We have integrated ERP systems for logistics, tracking of products and customer services. Our warehouses have integrated systems enabled to keep a check on our stocks and consumptions. GPS enabled logistics helps us to track shipments in-route. Our presence can also be felt on E-commerce websites and social media channels, which helps us in providing detailed information of our products to our customers. For example, we have introduced user friendly portals for queries and information about our retail products.

For establishing a full-fledged comprehensive IT platform across various locations, systems need to be duly integrated to internal and external entities like SAP systems. We have efficient internal teams for dealing with challenges like implementing ERP system for computing needs of our business with online dashboards. We have, recently, adopted mobility solutions onto our ERP platform which has offered comfort to our end users to stay connected to our systems while on the move.

We have adopted Cloud computing platform, including latest application software like SAP products, Broner–PSI Manufacturing Excellence Solutions for instance. High Speed MPLS network across locations like Tele Presence facility and advanced use of digital, social media and mobility are some of the areas of opportunities that we have already tapped in.

We are further working towards inducting SAP HANA and GRC which will bring in lot of strength, innovation, control and cost benefits to our IT setup. In an ever challenging business environment, IT plays a major role to support businesses to enhance productivity, reduce cost and ensure better control over assets.

Innovate to achieve higher agility, speed and efficiency

To keep users connected, and support operations and planning, there has to be proper access to current data. For this cause, along with IT solutions such as ERP and SAP platforms, Shared Accounting Centre can be equipped with best of the technologies to cater to the central business compute for the entire group.

Partnering with best of OEMs (Original equipment manufacturers) helps us to get the best products, prices and support services to augment digital ecosystem. For networking purposes, products from CISCO, Avaya and for MPLS and ILL, network from key service providers like Airtel, BSNL, and others are used with high end data security.

Revolutionary IT Trends for Digitizing Enterprises

We are living in a digital era where boundaries are getting stretched with each passing minute. Some of the strategic technology trends that are poised to have a profound impact on enterprises in the coming years are:

Businesses today have created a hyper-connected world where companies and its stakeholders have capabilities to act and interact with each other digitally across the globe. Hence, our roles in the IT space are pertinent to the growth of our organizations. Apart from ensuring seamless 24X7 IT, as technology professionals, we need to understand our business ecosystem well, assess business sensitivities, address the business needs and provide time bound IT technology solutions and leverage the IT solutions efficaciously to augment business productivity.